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By now, it’s fairly common knowledge that digital communications has cut into First-Class Mail volumes. But does this necessarily mean people always prefer to communicate digitally? To find out, we looked at the trends and customer preferences for one particular mail segment – transactional mail, which consists primarily of household bills and payments.

A corporate brand is a mix of tangible and intangible elements, from a company's name and logo to expectations and attributes that consumers associate with a particular product or service. A certain car manufacturer, for example, may make people think of luxury and reliability. A particular retailer may immediately bring to mind everyday goods at low prices.

The U.S. Postal Service has a corporate brand, too. Its attributes include reliability, convenience, value, and tradition, among other things.

As consumers and small businesses increasingly use computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices to buy and sell goods, there is a growing demand for flexible ways to buy services to ship these goods. The Postal Service lags behind its primary competitors in offering technology-savvy customers mobile applications and credit services to pay for packages and shipping.

The Office of Inspector General is tasked with ensuring efficiency, accountability, and integrity in the U.S. Postal Service. We also have the distinct mission of helping to maintain confidence in the mail and postal system, as well as to improve the Postal Service’s bottom line.

The U.S. Postal Service’s universal service obligation (USO), which establishes what mail services the Postal Service must provide, lacks a clear, comprehensive definition. The current USO is assumed to be a hodgepodge of various legal requirements and regulations that, in most cases, provide only broad guidance. For example, while public access to postal services is an important component of USO, there are no specifics about how many access points such as mail collection boxes or post offices must exist.

Revenue protection is critical to posts’ survival in a world of declining mail volume. And it can be a challenge, especially given the Universal Postal Union’s estimate that posts lose 5 to 10 percent of postage revenue due to fraud, poor mail acceptance, sampling and billing processes, and unreliable revenue collection technology.

Since fiscal year (FY) 2005, the U.S. Postal Service has spent more than $5.1 billion to buy fuel for Highway Contract Route (HCR) contractors under the Voyager Card Program. But, in a recent report that summarizes prior audits of the Voyager program, we conclude it is ineffective and the Postal Service should consider alternative ways to manage fuel purchases.

It was easy for a local landscaping company to obtain lucrative landscaping and snow removal work from two U.S. Postal Service managers; all it took was sharing the invoice proceeds with them. A joint investigation by the Postal Service Office of Inspector General and the FBI determined that two Postal Service managers conspired with contractors to receive bribery kickbacks by submitting over $590,000 in false and inflated invoices to the Postal Service, in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds paid to contractors.

The U.S. Postal Service manages nearly 32,000 post offices that offer retail services such as counter assistance, postage stamps, money orders, and Post Office boxes. The Postal Service can relocate post offices for business reasons, but must follow a specified process so the public knows about the plans and has the opportunity for input.

Today, rapid technological innovation means that change is almost continuous and often unpredictable. For the U.S. Postal Service, this fast-paced environment requires positioning to meet the needs of its wide range of customers as an uncertain future unfolds. To that end, our office conducted extensive research and employed scenario planning to understand what the needs and expectations of the customers of the future might be, and how the Postal Service could effectively meet those changing needs.